The web search giant, which is embroiled in a long-running row over the way it deals with pirated material, is considering the radical measure so that it can get rid of the root cause instead of having to change its own search results.

Executives want to stop websites more or less dedicated to offering links to pirated films, music and books from making money out of the illegal material. The plans, still in discussion, would also block funding to websites that do not respond to legal challenges, for example because they are offshore.

Last month Google announced a new format for their image search results, where they pull the image inline without sending the visitor onto the publisher website. At the same time they referenced some “phantom visitor” complaint from publishers to justify keeping the visitor on Google & highlighted how there were now more links to the image source. If publishers were concerned about the “phantom visitor problem” we wouldn’t see so many crappy slideshow pageviews.

Google’s leaked remote rater guidelines do mention something about rating an image lower under certain situations like where the author might want attributed for their work that they are routinely disintermediated from.

On Twitter a former Google named Miguel Silvar wrote: “If you do SEO and decide to block Image Search just because it’s bringing less traffic, you can stop calling yourself an SEO expert.”

Many “experts” would claim that any exposure is good, even if you don’t get credit for it. Many clients of said “experts” will end up bankrupt! Experts who suggest it is reasonable for content creators to be stripped of payment, traffic & attribution are at best conflicted.

As Google continues to win the game of inches of displacing the original sources, they don’t even need you to mark up your content for them to extract their knowledge graph. Bill Slawski shared a video of Google’s Andrew Hogue describing their mass data extraction effort: “It’s never going to be 100% accurate. We’re not even going to claim that it is 100% accurate. We are going to be lucky if we get 70% accuracy … we are going to provide users with tools to correct the data.”

If you as a publisher chose to auto-generate content at a 70% accuracy, pumped it up to first page rankings & then said “if people care they will fix it” Google would rightfully call you a spammer. If they do the same, it is knowledge baby.

Google pays for default placement in Safari & Firefox. Former Google executives head AOL & Yahoo!. Google can thus push for new cultural norms that make Microsoft look like an oddball or outsider if they don’t play the same game.

Is using payment to influence search results unethical unless the check has Google on it?

None of those links in the content use nofollow, in spite of many of them having Google Analytics tracking URLs on them.

And I literally spent less than 10 minutes finding the above examples & writing this article. Surely Google insiders know more about Google’s internal marketing campaigns than I do. Which leads one to ask the obvious (but uncomfortable) question: why doesn’t Google police themselves when they are policing others? If their algorithmic ideals are true, shouldn’t they apply to Google as well?

Clearly Google takes paid links that pass pagerank seriously, as acknowledged by their repeated use of them.

the page strips out the Yahoo! Directory PPC ads (on the categories which have them)

the page strips out the Yahoo! Directory logo

Recall that when Google ran their bogus sting operation on Bing, Google engineers suggest that Bing was below board for using user clickstreams to potentially influence their search results. That level of outrage & the smear PR campaign look ridiculous when compared against Google’s behavior toward the Yahoo! Directory, which is orders of magnitude worse:

Bing vs Google

Google vs Yahoo! Directory

editorial

Uses user-experience across a wide range of search engines to potentially impact a limited number of search queries in a minor way.

Google puts their own search box on the content of the Yahoo! Directory.

user behavior

Google claimed that Bing was using “their data” when tracking end user behavior.

Google hosts the Yahoo! Directory page, allowing themselves to fully track user behavior, while robbing Yahoo! of the opportunity to even see their own data with how users interact with their own listings.

In the above case the publisher absorbs 100% of the editorial cost & Google absorbs nearly 100% of the benefit (while disclaiming they do not endorse the page they host, wrap in their own search ad, and track user behavior on).

As we move into a search market where the search engines give you a slightly larger listing for marking up your pages with rich snippets, you will see a short term 10% or 20% lift in traffic followed by a 50% or more decline when Google enters your market with “instant answers.”

The ads remain up top & the organic resultss get pushed down. It isn’t scraping if they get 10 or 20 competitors to do it & then use the aggregate data to launch a competing service … talk to the bankrupt Yellow Pages companies & ask them how Google has helped to build their businesses.

Update: looks like this has been around for a while…though when I spoke to numerous friends nobody had ever seen it before. The only reason I came across it was seeing a referrer through a new page type from Google & not knowing what the heck it was. Clearly this search option doesn’t get much traffic because Google even removes their own ads from their own search results. I am glad to know this isn’t something that is widespread, though still surprised it exists at all given that it effectively removes monetization from the publisher & takes the content wholesale and re-publishes it across domain names.

Google announced they have added yet another rich snippet support, this one is for music results. The snippet will display the name of the song, the duration of the clip, and the album the song is from. The song title will link to the site’s specific page for that song. This works for both audio…